Brecht, Bertolt

original name EUGEN BERTHOLD FRIEDRICH BRECHT
(b. Feb. 10, 1898, Augsburg, Ger.--d. Aug. 14, 1956, East Berlin),
German poet, playwright, and
theatrical reformer whose epic theatre departed from the conventions of
theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological
forum for leftist causes.

Until 1924 Brecht lived in Bavaria, where he was born, studied medicine
(Munich, 1917-21), and served in an army hospital (1918). From this period
date his first play, Baal (produced 1923); his first success, Trommeln in
der Nacht (Kleist Preis, 1922; Drums in the Night); the poems and songs
collected as Die Hauspostille (1927; A Manual of Piety, 1966), his first
professional production (Edward II, 1924); and his admiration for Wedekind,
Rimbaud, Villon, and Kipling.

During this period he also developed a violently antibourgeois attitude that
reflected his generation's deep disappointment in the civilization that had
come crashing down at the end of World War I. Among Brecht's friends were
members of the Dadaist group, who aimed at destroying what they
condemned as the false standards of bourgeois art through derision
and iconoclastic satire. The man who taught him the elements of
Marxism in the late 1920s was Karl Korsch, an eminent Marxist theoretician
who had been a Communist member of the Reichstag but had been expelled from
the German Communist Party in 1926.

In Berlin (1924-33) he worked briefly for the directors Max Reinhardt and
Erwin Piscator, but mainly with his own group of associates. With the
composer Kurt Weill (q.v.) he wrote the satirical, successful ballad opera
Die Dreigroschenoper (1928; The Threepenny Opera) and the opera
Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930; Rise and Fall of the
Town of Mahoganny). He also wrote what he called "Lehr-stucke" ("exemplary
plays")--badly didactic works for performance outside the orthodox
theatre--to music by Weill, Hindemith, and Hanns Eisler. In these
years he developed his theory of "epic theatre" and an austere form of
irregular verse. He also became a Marxist.

In 1933 he went into exile--in Scandinavia (1933-41), mainly in Denmark, and
then in the United States (1941-47), where he did some film work in
Hollywood. In Germany his books were burned and his citizenship was
withdrawn. He was cut off from the German theatre; but between 1937 and 1941
he wrote most of his great plays, his major theoretical essays and
dialogues, and many of the poems collected as Svendborger Gedichte (1939).
The plays of these years became famous in the author's own and other
productions: notable among them are Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1941;
Mother Courage and Her Children), a chronicle play of the Thirty
Years' War; Leben des Galilei (1943; The Life of Galileo); Der gute Mensch
von Sezuan (1943; The Good Woman of Setzuan), a parable play set in prewar
China; Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (1957; The Resistible
Rise of Arturo Ui), a parable play of Hitler's rise to power set in prewar
Chicago; Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (1948; Herr Puntila and His Man
Matti), a Volksstuck (popular play) about a Finnish farmer who oscillates
between churlish sobriety and drunken good humour; and The Caucasian Chalk
Circle (first produced in English, 1948; Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, 1949),
the story of a struggle for possession of a child between its highborn
mother, who deserts it, and the servant girl who looks after it.

Brecht left the United States in 1947 after having had to give evidence
before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He spent a year
in Zurich, working mainly on Antigone-Modell 1948 (adapted from Hulderlin's
translation of Sophocles; produced 1948) and on his most important
theoretical work, the Kleines Organon fur das Theater (1949; "A Little
Organum for the Theatre"). The essence of his theory of drama, as revealed
in this work, is the idea that a truly Marxist drama must avoid the
Aristotelian premise that the audience should be made to believe
that what they are witnessing is happening here and now. For he saw that if
the audience really felt that the emotions of heroes of the past--Oedipus,
or Lear, or Hamlet--could equally have been their own reactions, then the
Marxist idea that human nature is not constant but a result of changing
historical conditions would automatically be invalidated. Brecht therefore
argued that the theatre should not seek to make its audience believe in the
presence of the characters on the stage--should not make it identify with
them, but should rather follow the method of the epic poet's art, which is
to make the audience realize that what it sees on the stage is merely an
account of past events that it should watch with critical
detachment. Hence, the "epic" (narrative, nondramatic) theatre is
based on detachment, on the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), achieved
through a number of devices that remind the spectator that he is being
presented with a demonstration of human behaviour in scientific spirit
rather than with an illusion of reality, in short, that the theatre is only
a theatre and not the world itself.

In 1949 Brecht went to Berlin to help stage Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder
(with his wife, Helene Weigel, in the title part) at Reinhardt's old
Deutsches Theater in the Soviet sector. This led to formation of the
Brechts' own company, the Berliner Ensemble, and to permanent return to
Berlin. Henceforward the Ensemble and the staging of his own plays had first
claim on Brecht's time. Often suspect in eastern Europe because of his
unorthodox aesthetic theories and denigrated or boycotted in the West for
his Communist opinions, he yet had a great triumph at the Paris Theatre des
Nations in 1955, and in the same year in Moscow he received a Stalin Peace
Prize. He died of a heart attack in East Berlin the following year.

Brecht was, first, a superior poet, with a command of many styles and moods.
As a playwright he was an intensive worker, a restless piecer-together of
ideas not always his own (The Threepenny Opera is based on John Gay's
Beggar's Opera, and Edward II on Marlowe), a sardonic humorist, and a man of
rare musical and visual awareness; but he was often bad at creating living
characters or at giving his plays tension and shape. As a producer he liked
lightness, clarity, and firmly knotted narrative sequence; a perfectionist,
he forced the German theatre, against its nature, to underplay. As a
theoretician he made principles out of his preferences--and even out of his
faults.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

A complete bibliography of Brecht's writings published up to the time of his
death by Walter Nubel may be found in the Second Special Brecht Number of
the East German periodicial Sinn und Form (1957); a concise summary of
Brecht literature is contained in Bertolt-Brecht-Bibliographie by
Klaus-Dietrich Petersen (1968). Collected works in the original German are
available in an edition in 8 thin-paper or 20 paperback volumes; Gesammelte
Werke (1967). This edition, however, is far from complete and the principles
according to which it was edited are open to doubt. A major collected
edition of Brecht's work in English, under the joint editorship of John
Willett and Ralph Manheim started publication with the first volume of
Collected Plays (1970). Eric Bentley has edited Seven Plays by Bertolt
Brecht (1961), a series of paperback volumes of Brecht's plays, and has
translated the poetry collection, Hauspostille (1927; Manual of Piety,
1966). A good selection of Brecht's theoretical writings is Brecht on
Theatre, trans. by John Willett (1964).

Critical and biographical works available in English include: John Willett,
The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (1959); Martin Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of
Evils (1959; revised edition under the title, Brecht: The Man and His Work,
1971); and Frederic Ewen, Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art and His Times
(1967, 1970). Max Spalter, Brecht's Tradition (1967), analyzes the chief
influences on Brecht in German literature.